Tip of the Week: Protect Your Word Document with a Password

Some documents contain more sensitive data on them than others, making them important to protect. When it won’t do to have documents containing boatloads of sensitive data available to anyone who obtains the document, you can turn to Microsoft Word to have a feature that protects them: password protection.

Not All Documents Require Protection Granted, not every single document your business produces will be important enough to protect. For example, the memo to tell everyone to stop eating each other’s lunches out of the employee fridge certainly isn’t as valuable as a sheet of contact information for an important client. Depending on the business and the type of data it works with, even a simple text file could contain valuable information.

Microsoft Word gives your business the chance to protect documents with a password, effectively restricting access to only those who know the password. This gives you the opportunity to protect documents so they can be reviewed or collaborated on only by authorized users.

Adding a Password To add a password to a document, follow these steps:

Under the File tab, select Info.

Select the Protect Document button. Use the Encrypt with Password option in the drop-down menu. You’ll see the option to Encrypt it.

In the space provided, enter the password you want to use. Keep in mind that these passwords are case-sensitive and cannot be recovered if they are forgotten (again, consider this before implementing the password). Once you’re done, click OK and confirm your password by typing it one more time. Complete the process by clicking OK once more.

Your Word document will now be locked behind a password. This process will work in both Microsoft Word 2016 or Microsoft Office 365. You can also remove the password from the file by following the same steps above until the Encrypt dialog box. You’ll see the password you chose in the space. All you have to do is delete it and press OK.

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